he social speculations
of 'Sybil' savour too much of the politician getting up a telling case;
and the religious speculations of 'Tancred' are pushed to the extreme
verge of the grotesque. But 'Coningsby' wants little but a greater
absence of purpose to be a first-rate novel. If Disraeli had confined
himself to the merely artistic point of view, he might have drawn a
picture of political society worthy of comparison with 'Vanity Fair.'
Lord Monmouth is evidently related to the Marquis of Steyne; and Rigby
is a masterpiece, though perhaps rather too suggestive of a direct study
from nature. Lord Monmouth is the ideal type of the 'Venetian'
aristocracy; and Rigby, like his historical namesake, of the corrupt
wire-pullers who flourished under their shade. The consistent
Epicureanism of the noble, in whom a sense of duty is only represented
by a vague instinct that he ought to preserve his political influence as
part of his personal splendour, and as an insurance against possible
incendiarism, is admirably contrasted by the coarser selfishness of
Rigby, who relieves his patron of all dirty work on consideration of
feathering his own nest, and fancying himself to be a statesman. The
whole background, in short, is painted with inimitable spirit and
fidelity. The one decided failure amongst the subsidiary characters is
Lucian Grey, the professional parasite, who earns his dinners by his
witty buffoonery. Somehow, his fun is terribly dreary on paper; perhaps
because, as a parasite, he is not allowed to indulge in the cutting
irony which animates all Disraeli's best sayings. The simple buffoonery
of exuberant animal spirits is not in Disraeli's line. When he can
neither be bitter nor rhetorical, he is apt to drop into mere mechanical
flatness. But nobody has described more vigorously all the meaner forms
of selfishness, stupidity, and sycophancy engendered under 'that fatal
drollery,' as Tancred describes it, 'called a parliamentary government.'
The pompous dulness which affects philosophical gravity, the appetite
for the mere dry husks and bran of musty constitutional platitude which
takes the airs of political wisdom, the pettifogging cunning which
supposes the gossips of lobbies and smoking-rooms to be the embodiment
of statesmanship, the selfishness which degrades political warfare into
a branch of stock-jobbing, and takes a great principle to be useful in
suggesting electioneering cries, as Telford thought that navigable
riv